


Give little Anguish

by middlemarch



Series: Plum dimension [8]
Category: Mercy Street (TV)
Genre: American Civil War, Biblical References, F/M, Romance, Worry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-13
Updated: 2016-09-13
Packaged: 2018-08-14 20:31:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8027947
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: Mary worries about a friend.





	Give little Anguish

“Mary, it’s late. Shouldn’t you come in?” Jed asked quietly. 

She might have been alone on the veranda for an hour, the hour twilight definitively became night and although it must be much warmer than the New Hampshire Novembers she was used to, she only wore a thin shawl over her calico dress. He wished he could say he had missed her and gone looking for her or that someone else had drawn his attention to her absence, Henry or Samuel, perhaps Emma Green on her way home or even Anne Hastings, squawking about Mary leaving her to manage the Tremain boy, who’d been vomiting bile for the past hour; none of those scenarios were true. No one had commented on where she had disappeared to, everyone too busy, too used to her bustling about unobtrusively or simply working somewhere else, though he thought Mary herself would have noticed if he had sequestered himself in his room or if Samuel were away overlong on an errand. 

Jed had glimpsed her silhouette as he walked from the ward, intending to make a meal of whatever was left behind by Hale, that consummate scavenger; it had not promised to be a robust repast and so he had made his way slowly, lollygagged his mother would have said, her mildly annoyed voice calling _Jedediah, stop your everlasting dawdling!_ a bittersweet memory now. His leisurely pace had the benefit of allowing him to see Mary, standing quite still, looking out into the night. He paused, then walked toward her, began to see she had her hands clasped in front of her and that she craned her neck to peer into the falling darkness. Just before he spoke, he saw the crockery dish set near her hem and gathered she must be looking for Plum. Had he seen the stray in the past few days? This week? He didn’t have a reason to keep track, only enjoyed whenever he might see the cat lapping eagerly at a bowl of milk and the accompanying fond look in Mary’s eyes, a most pleasant punctuation in the unrelenting, miserable grind of the War. Sometimes he felt sunrise was irrelevant-- his time must be measured in the deaths of blue-eyed boys or how long it took for one to be invalided home. Hours and days were porous, it was always time for him to be called to a bedside, to be handed a scalpel, to draw up the syringe and remind himself the morphine was venom, not honey, not worth tasting again.

“Just a little while longer, Jedediah,” Mary replied, glancing at him. It was hard to read her expression with only the crescent moon to light her face, but he heard the worry in her voice and the echo of a little girl who wished to stay up past bedtime in hopes of some discovery.

“She hasn’t come yet, wandering Plum?” he asked.

“No, not yet—wait, how did you know?” she answered, flustered, he thought, that he had guessed.

“I should like to say my powers of observation are very acute or that I know you very well, but truly, you are standing, at dusk, with a dish of milk by your feet. It’s the only sensible explanation,” he said, hoping she would not think he mocked her. 

“I haven’t seen her in over two weeks,” she said. “I know it’s a silly thing, to worry so over a stray cat during a War, with boys dying all around me, but I find I cannot help it.”

“I think perhaps she’s more than just a stray calico,” he offered.

“She is, even if she ought not to be. I can only imagine what Nurse Hastings would say, to see me thus, what condemnation she would rain down upon me,” Mary replied. He didn’t like to hear that in her, that resigned acceptance of Anne Hastings’s unjustified spite, the swiftness with which Mary judged herself.

“Damn Anne Hastings. Has she ever said anything worth listening to?” he exclaimed and Mary gasped a little at his unprovoked obscenity. He muttered, “I beg your pardon” reflexively as his mind catalogued what Mary’s gasp had sounded like, that breath that held the shape of her sweet mouth, the startle at his attack. He should not have said it, it was too much like the time he had tried to touch her without her leave, when he had been so intoxicated and rejected and had wanted her to be Woman and not Mary.

“We should go back--”

“Mary, I’m sorry. I spoke out of turn, I’m just as bad as Miss Hastings,” he said, trying to fix it, to get back to that moment before when Mary had been confiding, vulnerable, utterly appealing.

“I don’t know what’s worse, your unfortunate use of profanity or that nonsense. ‘As bad as Miss Hastings’—really, Jedediah,” Mary replied and he could have let her, could have left it there in their usual stance, that light challenge, Mary always making sure to soothe as she struck, more careful of him than he ever was of her. He didn’t want that.

“She’ll, Plum will come back,” he said. Mary looked at him and there it was, the return of her anxiety, her hope to be comforted, her loneliness that the little calico had assauged with her purring and the way she would arch her back to be stroked. 

“I don’t know, she mayn’t,” she said.

“Why wouldn’t she come back to someone who treats her so well? I can’t imagine the owner of the general store is giving her scraps from the cracker barrel or the butcher any offal. She knows you, she knows you care about her,” he replied, trying to reassure her with enough pragmatic evidence that she would accept it.

“That doesn’t mean she’ll come back. It’s not enough to love someone, something,” she said. 

Jed had not heard her sound this bleak before and realized she was not speaking only of Plum but he didn’t know why she was so troubled tonight. He wished he could take her in his arms, hold her very close and brush away any tears she might shed, taste them on his fingers, her lips. He wished for something more likely, that Plum would choose this moment to pad onto the veranda, that Mary might look down to see a pair of gleaming amber eyes regarding her above the dish of milk. But it was only the two of them and the moon, brighter but more distant as the minutes passed.

“Not always, no,” he said, thinking of her dead Baron, the mother who had disowned him, every boy they fitted for a coffin. He heard her steady breath catch as he spoke, then the sigh she used to settle herself.

Jed thought of the woman he stood beside and how Mary had tended him despite his cruelty to her and how she did not look away when he let his longing gaze rest on her. She had taken his hand in hers when the deserter died and he had felt the strength in her slender fingers, the blunt edge of her nails, trimmed to the quick, the calluses from the menial work she never shirked. He had dreamt of that hand wearing his grandmother’s star sapphire ring, a bit of night secured in a golden band, and it had stroked through his curls, across his cheek, slid the braces from his shoulders. Night after night, her hands reaching for him, always drawing him closer to her, the same expression in her dark eyes that he recognized from the day and that similarity allowed him to wake without shame, no matter what his sleeping mind had conjured. 

“You may be surprised, though, mightn’t you? At a return—overdue or not just as you expect, but still a reunion? There’s always hope—‘if thou canst believe, all things are possible,” isn’t that so? It’s Mark, I can’t recall the chapter and verse, but he’s always the most straighforward of the Gospels, I think,” he said, almost shocked by the earnest tone he found he’d taken but it was right, what she had wanted if her bright eyes were the measure.

“Yes, I may… be surprised. We all may, don’t you think?” she said and then neatly took hold of his arm and stretched towards him, kissing him on the corner of his mouth, a kiss he could taste again alone in his bed and consider, so forward and hopeful and thankful. “Oh! Jedediah, you must forgive me,” she cried, her boldness ephemeral like quicksilver, “I should not--”

“I can’t forgive you, Mary. I won’t,” he interrupted and she looked aghast, even more distressed than when she thought about Plum forsaking her, so he plowed on.

“You’ve done nothing that needs, nothing that merits my forgiveness. You’ve only given me a gift. So I’ll thank you for it and there’s an end to it,” he said.

“Is there? An end to it? I suppose,” she said, an experienced widow, the most pragmatic Head Nurse, the dreamy girl he had never met but on this veranda, the memory of her called forth by the hour, the conversation, her impetuous caress.

“Well, for tonight at least. Leave the milk, she may yet come,” he said. 

He offered her his arm, he might, there was nothing untoward about that, even if they were alone in the moonlight, if her kiss was still delicious on his mouth. She took what he offered, for there was nothing else to do, and they walked back to the hallway, shadows thick not only in the corners, but along the walls, the floor and along the bannister, the stairs that led to her bed. They left the dish of milk behind, for Plum to find if she would; Jed decided he would return it to the kitchen in the morning, before Mary had to attend to it herself.

**Author's Note:**

> I thought Mary's fear for Plum made a nice proxy for her other concerns and losses. The title is from Emily Dickinson and is intended to reflect how much concern Mary think she should have for a missing cat.


End file.
